The current study investigated the possibility that language switches could be relatively automatically triggered by context. "Single-word switches," in which bilinguals switched languages on a single word in midsentence and then immediately switched back, were contrasted with more complete "whole-language switches," in which…

Drawing on data collected via a web-based survey, the study investigates the relationship between preferences for (in)formal language and attitudes toward linguistic variation among a large group of monolingual and multilingual adults (n = 379). Also explored are the links between preferences for (in)formal language and several secondary…

Students acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as a second language (L2) struggle with fingerspelling comprehension more than skilled signers. These L2 learners might be attempting to perceive and comprehend fingerspelling in a way that is different from native signers, which could negatively impact their ability to comprehend fingerspelling.…

An analysis of data collected from 2347 users of English on their self-reported swearing behaviour in English revealed significant higher values for the 1159 native English (L1) users than for the 1165 English foreign language (LX) users. Parallel analyses on the data of the L1 and LX users revealed that the interlocutor effect was slightly…

Is the feeling of difference experienced by many bi- and multilinguals linked to a later age of onset (AoA) and a lower level of proficiency in the foreign language (LX)? This empirical study, based on the qualitative and quantitative data from 1005 bi- and multilinguals, suggests AoA is unrelated to feelings of difference. While several…

The effects of psycholinguistic variables are critical to the evaluation of theories about the cognitive reading system. However, reading research has tended to focus on the impact of key variables on average performance. We report the first investigation examining variation in psycholinguistic effects across the life span, from childhood into old…

Ten adult readers, advanced in their control of two languages, Korean and English, were recruited for a study of academic literacy practices to examine the various linguistic repertoires on which they drew. Analysis of their language use revealed many instances of "translanguaging," that is, a flexible reliance on two languages to serve…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

The purposes of the study were to determine the health literacy levels of Latinos in the Greater Cincinnati Area in both English and Spanish by utilizing two standardized quantitative measures of health literacy, and to undertake an assessment of the relationship between language, health literacy and acculturation in this community. Given a rapid…

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among…

This paper investigates the effect of listener attitudes on the ability to understand a foreign (non-Australian) accent. The research focuses on individual listener characteristics, such as attitude and frequency of contact with accented speakers, rather than speech production. Data was collected through a web-based survey and analysis employed…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population. Method: The BEL sentences were presented…